How many of you are Extreme Programmers?

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Christopher Blunck:
  [...]
> The natural response a non-Python programmer has to this statement is,
> "what?!  you __trust__ the programmer?!  that doesn't work in most
> environments."  Despite the ignorance this response demonstrates, I
> none-the-less thought about the statement and the answer I came up
> with was "we write lots of really thorough tests to demonstrate
> functionality."

There is another point:  Although there are indeed lots of
programmers who do not deserve this trust and will betray it every
time, the feeling among Pythonistas is, I think, that (a) this is
not sufficient justification for hamstringing the competent, and
(b) no language feature will make an appreciable dent in the
incompetent's ability to screw everything up.

Dealing with incompetent programmers is an organizational problem,
not a language design problem.

-- 
Steven Taschuk                            staschuk at telusplanet.net
Every public frenzy produces legislation purporting to address it.
                                                  (Kinsley's Law)